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Does your online personal brand measure up? Teitel

Personal brands are no longer solely the business of celebrities or real estate agents; they are the business of us all.

It’s no mystery that employers often investigate the social media presence of job candidates, but this practice has become so routine in recent years that for some bosses, it demands the special care of a professional service, writes Emma Teitel. (Carl Court / GETTY IMAGES file photo)

A few days ago I was in the process of posting a dorky family photo to my wife Ella’s Instagram account when she stopped me dead in my cyber-tracks.

“Don’t post that,” she said. “It’s off brand.”

“Off brand?” I asked. “What brand?”

“My personal brand,” she said.

We have been together almost a decade but for some reason I had no idea that, all this time, she was curating a “personal brand” on social media.

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“I call it art-cute,” she told me. (Not to be confused with art-brut, French for “Outsider Art.”)

What does this mean? In her own words: “Artsy photographs with a lot of emoticons in the captions.”

I asked Ella if I had a personal brand and she said that beyond my column-writing persona (young-ish, gay Canadian), my social media presence needed serious work. “It’s just random photos of friends and strangers’ dogs,” she said. “There’s no discernible theme.”

I don’t care, I told her.

But it turns out, I should.

Unfortunately, Ella is onto something. Personal brands are no longer solely the business of celebrities or real estate agents; they are the business of us all. And I’m not just referring to people in the media or public relations professions, but to anyone at any age and in any industry — especially if he or she is looking for a job.

It’s no mystery that employers often investigate the social media presence of job candidates, but this practice has become so routine in recent years that for some bosses, it demands the special care of a professional service.

Enter The Social Index, an Australian start-up that helps employers determine a job candidate’s social media persona and influence. The company, which launched this year and plans to expand to the U.K. soon, scours the public Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles of a job candidate and produces a report — or in the company’s own words, a “core analysis” — summarizing the person’s online presence.

According to Fiona McLean, managing director of The Social Index, the company’s “core analyses” show employers how job candidates “represent” themselves online, and ensure “that appropriate online behaviours are evident.” Of course, if those “appropriate behaviours” aren’t evident, it lets them know that, too.

But the company’s role goes beyond flagging offensive or illegal content. It also tracks how influential a job candidate is: how many followers they have and how many people their posts reach.

McLean says The Social Index obtains job candidates’ consent when it conducts its investigations. But the service does pose a lot of thorny ethical questions. Such as: if a job-seeker makes political statements on Facebook or Twitter that don’t align with their potential employer’s views, can The Social Index relay this information to the employer?

McLean says no, that The Social Index relays only “relevant” professional information to employers and as a result, reduces bias. But “relevant information” might mean many different things to many different people.

For example: “Bob Smith Tweeted 3,600 times yesterday,” might be music to some bosses’ ears but it’s also likely to be misery to others.

In the end, what’s troubling about The Social Index and similar social media investigative start-ups that are likely to launch in years to come, isn’t that they are invading our privacy.

On the contrary, the content The Social Index accesses is 100 per cent public.

What’s troubling, rather, is the likelihood that these services will slowly erode the fun of social media itself. Having a distinct personality or a weird, albeit totally inoffensive presence on Instagram (for example, Ella’s “art-cute”) is, as of now, not a bad thing.

You can be a lawyer who tweets about baseball, an IT specialist who hates Justin Trudeau, or a columnist who loves Kernels Popcorn. Sure, your boss may check in every once in a while to see what you’re up to but unless you’re a teacher or a political operative, as long as you’re not espousing hate or breaking the law, you’re probably OK.

But in the future of the The Social Index, a future where employers hire agencies to write detailed reports about job candidates’ online activity, you’d be foolish not to mould your personal brand into something bland, mainstream and easily palatable. And you’d be hesitant, I suspect, to post anything interesting or offbeat at all.

The irony in this is that while companies like The Social Index exist to encourage transparency and reveal truths about the job candidates they are investigating, they are likely to achieve exactly the opposite: that is, a working world in which employers know less about the people they are hiring than ever before.

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